istockphoto

In stock photography more so than any other type of photography, the trends of photographs being taken and shared change from year to year. As marketing approaches and accompanying business values change, so does the stock photography market, so as to reflect the growing need for a specific ‘look’ or ‘type’ of photograph.

Here to show us what’s trending for 2014 is an interesting (and possibly useful) infographic released by Getty Images’ iStock.

The past few days seem to be filling up with more and more stock photography drama. From the announcement of Getty's new embedding tool to 500px Prime's change in payment, things keep getting more and more confusing. Well, to add to this confusion, we have yet another piece of news, this time from iStock... a company owned by none other than Getty.

A reader over at Gizmodo sent a tip their way yesterday pointing to an embarrassing situation involving PayPal's use of a certain stock photograph.

Although it has since been removed, a photo of a small pocket watch over on PayPal's Political Campaigns page with a "donate" button located over it was found bearing a rather obvious iStock watermark... oops.

iStock, which is owned by Getty Images, is in the process of notifying some nine thousand users that they owe Getty money because an error with the payment system overpaid them in September and October of 2013.

A new controversy is brewing in the world of stock photography. Just last month, it came to light that Getty had agreed to license 5000 of its stock photos to Google while paying the creators of the images a meager one-time fee of $12. Now, one of Getty's most successful stock photographers is claiming that his account is being terminated in the aftermath of the first hoopla.

Back in early December, Google announced that the company would be adding 5,000 new stock images of "nature, weather, animals, sports, food, education, technology, music and 8 other categories" for free use in Docs, Sheets and Slides.

At the time nobody knew how Google got these images, who took them, or what kind of license they came with. The mystery continued on unsolved until a week ago when an iStocker discovered one of his own images in the search results. As it turns out, the use of these photos is the result of a little known licensing deal between Google and Getty Images.

Slate magazine just published an interesting article on David Hobby and his popular …